There are strong parallels between THORP and the proposed £20bn Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant. Powerful arguments were put forward against the construction of both plants, but the Government and the Nuclear Industry continued to stubbornly pursue these massively expensive and dangerous projects.

NuClear News, December 2018, The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says while the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and Sellafield Limited have made progress with reducing delays and expected cost overruns on 14 major projects at Sellafield, with a combined lifetime cost estimate of £6 billion, there is still a long way to go.

Most major projects at Sellafield are still significantly delayed, with expected combined cost overruns of £913 million. The NDA has not systematically reviewed why these projects keep running into difficulties, or analysed properly the constraints it says prevent them from making faster progress.

Until this work is completed, the Committee will remain sceptical about the long-term strategy to decommission Sellafield. And despite this Committee’s recommendation nearly five years ago, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy has still not decided what to do with the plutonium stockpile currently stored at Sellafield.

Given the scale and unique challenges at Sellafield, the NDA must have a firm grip of the work that takes place on the site. This was not the case with the NDA’s recently failed contract to decommission its Magnox sites.

PAC Deputy Chair, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP said:

“The Government’s oversight of the NDA’s performance could and should be much better,
particularly on projects at Sellafield that cost a considerable amount of public money. BEIS needs
to seriously get a grip on its oversight of nuclear decommissioning in this country.”

The Committee’s findings make yet more dreary reading for the UK taxpayer says Cumbrians
Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE). The costs described as ‘a misuse of public funds’
by a spokesman for the report’s authors the Government’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
The PAC report pulls few punches in its criticism of the way the NDA is managing many of the
major projects needed to clean up Sellafield.

The site currently receives some £2bn of public money every year and, over the next 100+ years
of decommissioning is expected to cost a total of £91bn. In a slight but revealing departure from
the pattern of previous reports, PAC raises the spectre of the UK’s plutonium stockpile (40% of
the world’s global stock) and the latest thinking by Government on its long-term plutonium
management options. CORE says an update on its plutonium plans is currently being finalised
by the NDA and could be published soon.

The PAC report reveals the following:

 Major projects are expected to cost over £900 million more than originally budgeted and be subjected to delays of over 13 years.

 The NDA has cancelled three projects since 2012 after spending £586 million of taxpayers’ money on them.

Two of the above projects – the silo direct encapsulation project and the box transfer facility were cancelled after the NDA projected a combined cost increase of £2.1 billion and a combined delay of nine years

.  The NDA’s programme to deal with the plutonium stockpile in the near term is late and its costs are increasing.

 The concerning discovery last year (NAO report 20.6.18) that some plutonium canisters have been decaying faster than expected is made worse by the fact that the NDA’s project to repackage these canisters is at least two years late and expected to cost over £1.5 billion, £1 billion more than it first expected

.  The series of contingency arrangements to manage these decaying canisters are shortterm fixes for a long-term problem and BEIS has yet to set out clearly what its strategy is and the associated costs to the taxpayer.

 BEIS has still not decided between the two plutonium management options available – its long-term storage prior to final disposal as waste in a geological disposal facility (GDF) that has yet to be located or constructed, or its reuse as fuel in new nuclear power stations – but has told the PAC Committee that ‘it is not comfortable with any of the potential options for managing plutonium other than disposing it in the GDF’ (2)

Meanwhile the controversial Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at Sellafield has started work on processing its final batch of waste fuel after operating for only 24 years. (3) THORP opened in 1994 to reprocess spent fuel from the UK’s newer reactors – like Hinkley Point B – and overseas customers. Reprocessing is a chemical process which separates out plutonium and unused uranium from spent nuclear fuel.

There are strong parallels between THORP and the proposed £20bn Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant. Powerful arguments were put forward against the construction of both plants, but the Government and the Nuclear Industry continued to stubbornly pursue these massively expensive and dangerous projects. This Stop Hinkley Campaign briefing asks whether there are any lessons we can learn from the THORP experience to help us to evaluate the merits of continuing to build Hinkley Point C.

Currently, the ground-works for Hinkley Point C aren’t even finished so, in theory, it should be straightforward not to go ahead with the project, if it looks like full construction and operation would be a mistake. In fact not going ahead with the plant could save electricity consumers between £27bn and £50bn over the 35 years that the plant would have operated. (4)

The construction of THORP was very controversial and was the subject of a Public Inquiry in 1977, which ran for one hundred days. It was argued that the Inquiry would be a way of rationally weighing up all the evidence in order to come up with the correct decision on whether or not to give the plant the go-ahead. However, Professor Brian Wynne has argued that the Inquiry was in fact a charade, meant only to give the impression of rational decision making. (5)

At the Inquiry it was argued that THORP would be needed to supply plutonium for a new type of reactor – the Fast Breeder Reactor. Justice Parker, the Inquiry Inspector, concluded that THORP should go ahead and the Government agreed. It was built in the 1980s and switched on in the 1990s. Within a week of THORP starting up, the prototype Fast Reactor at Dounreay in the north of Scotland was shut down – ending the whole UK Fast Breeder programme. (6)

By 1992 the original rationale for THORP had all but disappeared before it even opened so the Government decided to commission the consulting firm Touche Ross to examine the financial implications of THORP’s operation or abandonment. It concluded that the economic benefit of operating THORP versus not operating it were £1.81bn for BNFL and £950m for the UK (7). In 1994, after a long and agonised debate, the Government decided to allow the plant to operate and the first waste spent fuel was ‘sheared’ – the outer cladding taken off – as the first step in the reprocessing process, in March of that year (8).

Another raison dêtre for THORP was quickly found, with construction work of the Sellafield MOX Plant beginning a few weeks later in April 1994. This was meant to produce plutonium fuel for ordinary reactors rather than Fast Breeders. The Sellafield MOX Plant was expected to generate £400m; instead it cost £2.2 Billion.

THORP was originally expected to reprocess 7,000 tonnes of spent fuel in its first ten years of operation. By the time it closes it will probably have reprocessed around 9,300 tonnes of spent fuel. If the plant had been working to its design capacity it should have completed 9,300 tonnes ten years ago in 2008 (9). THORP’s throughput was never reliable, nor to specification

The cost of building THORP steadily rose from £300m at the time of the public inquiry in 1977 to £1.8bn on completion in 1992. With the additional cost of associated facilities this figure rose to £2.8bn. The operator at the time – British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) received advance payments from its customers of £1.6bn which largely covered the construction costs. The net result, according to BNFL was that over the first ten years the income would not only cover all building operating and future decommissioning costs, but would produce a profit of £500m. One economic analysis in 1993 pointed out that at a projected profit of only £50m per year, the economics of the project looked extremely vulnerable to unforeseen events, and British electricity consumers would be paying £1.7bn more than necessary to have British spent fuel reprocessed at THORP (10). This analysis turned out to be prophetic – there have certainly been plenty of unforeseen events since 1994. With THORP operating around a decade behind schedule, any notional profit originally expected must have long since been completely wiped out.

A report for the Government by management consultants Arthur D Little predicted in 2001 that the Sellafield MOX Plant would earn the UK more than £200m in foreign currency by exporting MOX fuel to Japan and several other countries. After the plant opened it was plagued by production problems due to its faulty design and layout. Instead of producing 120 tonnes of MOX a year, it managed less than 14 tonnes in eight years. The plant was closed in August 2011. (11) The plant is thought to have cost British taxpayers about £2.2bn in capital, operating and decommissioning costs since it was built. An internal report concluded that the facility was “not fit for purpose” and its performance over a decade was “very poor”. (12)

The economics of THORP and subsequently the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) depended on the constructors and operators being able to build and operate the facilities according to the specification. But nuclear facilities being built in the west have suffered from delays and almost always tended to have large cost overruns. Recent ones have ALL suffered horrendous cost overruns – in the USA (4), France (1) and Finland (1). Yet otherwise sensible, financial analysts have, in the past produced reports to justify building facilities at Sellafield and Hinkley which seem to ignore this fact and assume construction and operation will proceed precisely on target.

The prospects of avoiding a Sellafield-scale financial disaster with Hinkley Point C do not look good. As Emeritus Professor Steve Thomas has pointed out: “Hinkley Point C would use a technology unproven in operation – the EPR – which has run into appalling problems of cost & time overruns in the 3 projects using it. It would be supplied by Areva NP, which is in financial collapse and might not be saveable and has been found to be falsifying quality control records for safety critical items of equipment for up to 50 years – a bizarre situation.”

Time to cancel Hinkley Point C now while the cancellation costs are relatively low. Leaving things any longer risks yet another Sellafield-scale financial disaster. http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/NuClearNewsNo113.pdf